In a beef slaughterhouse production line, the carcass is suspended by its hind legs, is drained and gutted. The hide is stripped off, and the hanging carcass has a beef head still attached to it. In prior practice, the muscles surrounding the neck in the ear and jaw area must be cut by a manually operated knife. In addition, a knife cut is made directly at the base of the head to expose the Atlas joint. The Atlas joint is the joint between the occipital skull bone and the Atlas vertebrae, which is the first cervical vertebrae. The worker must turn and rotate his wrist back and forth through various angles while working the knife into the Atlas joint and cutting tendons so that the weight of the head will force the joint apart and, thus, facilitate separation of the head from the carcass. This repetitive movement of the worker's wrist, hand and elbow places excessive strain on the operator's muscles and tendons. When repeated often, this results in carpal tunnel syndrome. This is an ailment which is extremely painful and debilitating.
When a scissors-type power tool with conventional shear blades is used to cut through the Atlas joint and nearby tissue, the cut can be made quickly with little effort to eliminate the difficult hand-work portion of separating the head. However, these shear blades have sharp edges, and often the blades do not find the way between the joint. This causes bone chips which enter the meat to result in a less desirable product. The bone chips require additional labor to find and remove those bone chips. The prior manual methods resulted in disability, and the prior power tool methods resulted in bone chips in the meat. As a result, there is need for an improvement.